Presentation from Functional Gathering Week Schibsted Classified Media 2013 How tags will change classifieds. Some of the greater challenges with today's classifieds ad insertion is the lack of structured metadata. Searches mostly relying on text search and the set number of specific categories you have to group your ad in. During the summer of 2013, a group of students at Finn.no looked at these challenges, and found that these challenges could work better if tags were used in the insertion prosess. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term used to describe an item. A tag can also be viewed as metadata for the item. By using tags the team suggests that the ad insertion gets simplified. Having only one place to insert different metadata makes the process easy if the user understands the concept of tags. The most streamlining part of tags is that as soon as the system has information about the item being sold (like the title), it can start suggesting relevant tags for the ad. These tags become even more relevant the more is known about the object. This makes it very simple, especially for mobile, to input lots of structured metadata. Because, when given relevant tags, the user would just have to click on them to add the information to their ad. Today some users find it challenging to find the correct category for their item. With tags there is a category for everything. They can themself describe the item the way they see it. The tags, that are added to the sales object, are in reality search filters and can be used to generate a precise search. While the user is searching for relevant ads, the system can suggest related tags to get a very specific and precise search. Its also possible to use tags as smarttags. A “smarttag” is a tag with a value. An example of this can be the tag width, age or color, which can hold the respective values 90 cm, 5 years and red. The way tags structures the metadata makes it a lot easier to analyse the marketplace by looking at trends and popular tags by seasons or events. Also by letting tags be free, the marketplace can harness the creativity of all their users to come up with solutions to both unknown and difficult challenges of describing objects. The question you might be asking yourself is how can we introduce the concept of tags and make it part of the ad insertion. One way of doing this can be to introduce tags as an optional concept and watch the adaption. By this, the concept can be tested to figure out the best way to adapt it to the given marketplace. The real important part to understand is that every category, in todays systems, is in reality a tag. We can see some challenges with this system, e.g. spam tags, vulgar tags and user trying to misuse the system. So, the system might need some form of moderation. There can also be difficulties with homonyms, synonyms and stemming. Will #tags make ad insertion perfect?